Books for the Wannabe Geek

Getting creative with iPad drawing and painting applications

I have quite a few drawing and painting art applications on my iPad. There is Art Studio, ArtRage, Procreate, Artistic Studio, PS Express and Sketchbook Pro and these I have for working with bitmaps like photos and drawings. I also have vector type of drawing applications such as iDraw and then I have Ink Artist and I haven’t quite yet worked out exactly how that fits in. The application that I have tended to go to when I wanted to do something artistic with drawing or painting with my iPad has been either Procreate or ArtStudio. On account of the fact that I really like using the application Pixelmator on my Mac I was delighted to see a version for iPad become available. The Pixelmator for iPad application was demonstrated at the Apple event when they showed us the iPad Air 2. This application has some pretty good tricks up its sleeve and without a doubt I had to get my hands on it and see what I could do with it. I have been doing some comparisons between Procreate and Pixelmator for iPad and I think that the Procreate application still has the edge. For now at least!

Get Procreate

What can you do with the iPad drawing and painting application Procreate

For me I think that the best part of the application is the fact that you get so many brushes to paint with. Not only that, but these brushes are highly configurable and you can easily create your own. I like the fact that this application will work with my Wacom creative Bluetooth stylus. When using a tool like this with the iPad and having over 2000 levels of pressure so that you can more easily simulate drawing with an actual brush or pen. It is almost as good as using something like the Cintiq drawing tablets which are much more expensive to buy.

The brushes that you have can also be used when you are using the smudge tool and the eraser tool. This makes it very easy to get the effect that you are looking for whether you are putting the colour in there, squidging it around or taking the colour out of your drawing. You do of course get layers within this application and I’m finding that it is the best way to make selections of your drawings. I do think that the selecting tools could be better and I would hope that will come soon in a future version.

Colour palettes in Procreate

You can use palettes to keep a selection of colours ready for using for your drawing and with the colour wheel it is extremely easy to choose your colours. It is possible to add colours that you have chosen from the colour wheel and put them into palettes that you have available. If you tap and hold down on your screen you get the colour eye dropper picker that lets you take a colour from your drawing. Handy to be able to do that as it is quite likely that you will have created colours by mixing them on your screen as you were drawing.

Create drawings or work with photos

With Procreate you can do both drawing and painting and also work with photos. With the photos you are more likely to be using the small range of filters available. You will find that there are other iPad effects applications, that give you more choices, if you want to totally change the look of your photo. With Pixelmator for iPad you get more effects and filters. You get the basic ones for blur and sharpen, but you also get filters which will make your image crazy such as with pinch or kaleidoscope. So if you’re choosing between Procreate and Pixelmator for iPad for working with photos then the better choice is to use Pixelmator. For someone like me that likes to do both drawing and also work with photos it is a good idea to have both of these iPad art applications available for use.

Repairing images

There is an amazing feature with Pixelmator for iPad which allows you to repair images. It is not simply just to remove a spot from somebody’s face, it is possible to completely remove a whole person. It works so well and is work so quickly on the iPad Air 2 that you will not fail to be amazed. This sort of facility has previously only been available on desktop bitmap editing applications.